Indian resistance leader and ‘Father of the Nation’ Mahatma Gandhi once said that “a civilisation should be judged by its treatment of minorities”. That is a good position to take. Unfortunately, reality is often quite different.
In the West, far more attention is often given to minorities—at least, when it comes to non-Arab groups such as Kurds or certain Christian communities—than to majorities. In Syria’s case, that would mean Sunni Arabs. Furthermore, there can be selectivity regarding compassion for Arab minorities. For instance, the suffering of Palestinian Arab Christians under Israeli occupation is often completely ignored.
It goes without saying that religious and ethnic minorities must have the same rights as the majority, but that does not mean that the majority should be overlooked.
The fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024 also marked the end of a period of dominance by members of Syria’s Alawite minority, as power shifted back to individuals from the Sunni majority (as was the case before the Ba’ath Party’s takeover in 1963). Yet the backgrounds of these new Islamist-inclined Sunni rulers are quite different from those who held power before the Ba’athist period. Islamism now plays a far bigger role.
The fallen Assad regime has often incorrectly been described as a regime dominated by Alawites. Although Alawites played a key role in it, it was, in fact, an Alawite-dominated dictatorship that affected everyone. Alawite elites benefited, but only if they remained unconditionally loyal to the regime.
Thus far, there is little evidence of Western empathy for Syria’s Alawites, even though they are a minority. Perhaps this is because they are still generally associated with the Assad regime and therefore seen as having sympathised with it.
A dictatorship is usually a minority regime, whether the ruling elite comes from a majority group (such as the Sunnis in Syria), or a minority (such as the Alawites). Likewise, it cannot be assumed that the new Sunni rulers, of the originally radical Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), represent Syria’s Sunnis. Rather, they constitute a small Sunni minority within the large Sunni majority population.
